


It Is Not Yet the End

by Schwoozie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria Safe-Zone, Bathing/Washing, Beth Lives, Depression, F/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 13:30:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3611835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl doesn't know if it's possible to love someone back to life. All he can do is try.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Is Not Yet the End

**Author's Note:**

> Blame babysitterbeth.

“You even showered yet?”

He feels oddly like a mother hen, standing in the doorway and looking into her room, everything white and pristine and new—except for her. Except for her, seated on the edge of the bed. The bed that, based on its hospital corners and the sleeping bag on the carpet, has not been slept in. Her, the miracle, the girl who lived, looking at him through a curtain of her own filth.

“Don’t feel like it,” she says, dull. Everything about her is dull, right now, in the late-afternoon light. The low contrast sepia that slips in through the drawn shades does little to illuminate the sallow of her cheeks. They’re still covered in the dirt she showed up in, exactly 29 hours ago. The dirt and the blood that caked her exhausted face as she collapsed in his arms.

She seems set to collapse now as he steps forward until he’s a foot away, near enough to touch, and he does; slowly, hesitantly, he brings up his hand and pushes back her hair, tucking it behind an ear and brushing her cheek in the process. She must know it’s on purpose—a man with his economy of movement, his fear of touch, does not do so without purpose—but she doesn’t say anything. Just looks at him with her dull blue eyes that are yet prettier than anything he’s seen in the whole goddamn world.

“Lemme help you?”

It takes her a while to nod, bone-tired as she is, and he doesn’t waste a moment in taking her elbow, guiding her to her feet. There’s an ensuite bathroom with a tub and he cranks the faucet as wide as it will go. He knows this’ll take up most of their hot water for the week, but he honestly couldn’t give a damn; all he knows is the steam is already giving her cheeks some color and her movements are a little less jerky as she begins to tug her shirt over her head.

“Wait, you don’t have’ta—”

She pauses, shirt around her elbows, bellybutton winking at him, her serious eyes in her serious face wide and tired and sad.

“Does it matter?”

 _It does matter,_ he wants to say, _it does._ _Because you aren’t some wild thing anymore, some creature torn to shreds and waiting for scraps; you’re you, you belong to you, you and your skin and your bones and your wretched heart that won’t give up its beating; I’d move the world for you and just a glimpse of your smile and you don’t owe me a thing._

But he doesn’t say it; doesn’t think she has the energy to hear. So he just shrugs and turns to the water as she undresses. She doesn’t pause when she reaches her underwear but she does when she turns her head and her eyes meet her own in the mirror, and he can’t help the way his eyes are dragged over to look; her thin white ribs standing stark like maypoles, the darkness curved thick like eyeshadow beneath. The mounds of her nipples are nearly flat against her chest, she’s got so little fat, and he wants to touch them just to see some part of her come to life. But when she looks back at him he’s looking at her eyes and he begins to take his clothes off too.

They were naked together once, when they were alone together. The before, the before, the before that was after and now and all in between, the way those days settled and swirled round his head. Like a lifetime apart, a journey through mists, those days they spent like Adam and Eve, wandering the woods with little in mind but the sighs of the person beside them and the way the world was turning. It was after a long and hot day when they came to a stream almost wide enough to be called a river. Daryl wanted to stand guard, he wanted to stay by their packs with his eyes to the woods as she took her refreshment; but she smiled, then; she smiled and she danced a bit as she tugged off her boots and flicked cool droplets against him as she crouched at the water’s edge; and they only looked at each other from the corner of eyes and in glances through shadow, and yet when they emerged Daryl felt he could have drawn a map of her.

The map is cracked and dried parchment as he holds her hand, wrist firm, hold steady, keeping her shaking body afoot as she lowers herself into the tub. Once she’s seated she doesn’t lie back, or even wet herself; just draws her legs into her chest, hugs her arms around her calves and stares into the swirls of dark that the water skims from her skin.

“Want me in there?”

She doesn’t answer, so he moves slow, giving her time to startle if she needs to, but she doesn’t; just scooches to the front of the tub, still hugging her legs, waiting for him to stretch out his knees alongside her. He touches her spine with the tips of his fingers and watches a shudder run from the knob of her neck to the shadow at the base of her hips and he suddenly wonders if he should be doing this.

But then she’s leaning back into him, accepting his touch, and with it he lets his eyes take in the skin and the bones of her; traces without wanting to the ribs that stand just as stark here as they do in front. He looks up and sees her chin has tucked itself into her shoulder so she can watch him without turning; she catches him looking and blinks shyly and once the dirt is gone she might even blush.

He moves her with taps of his fingers; one to each side of her waist to press her further forward; a palm to her spine and she’s leaning back, not even lowering her elbows to catch herself for his arms have done it for her; and once she’s floating between his legs, ears submerged and eyes turned to the ceiling and the spreading strands of her hair tickling the inside of his thighs—he thinks he might smile before this night is through.

He does not smile now, though; tends his energy, tends his time to watching the knots of hair creep through the water, keeping his arm firm under her back—not because he doesn’t know she would float, not because she doesn’t feel the way her torso bobs in the water; because when she fell it was her own blood which caught the fall and he doesn’t trust these second chances. He doesn’t trust the world that took her away, but he trusts the woman who brought her back, and as she looks at him upside down with those eyes almost turned to smiling, he knows she trusts that arm beneath her.

When her hair is at last soaked through he moves to cross his calves beneath her back so he can free up his hand. He moves it with his other to the base of her skull, first; cradles the curve of her like a golden egg, a grail. Her eyes are half-lidded and he can’t tell if she’s watching him or the ceiling as he begins to massage her scalp; and she doesn’t make a noise as her eyes close but he sees the way her throat moves, the flutter that passes through the skin over her heart, and it sets his own beating faster.

He doesn’t bother with sitting her up; just piles the shampoo in his hands and works it through the lifted strands one by one, root to tip, watching in fascination as the dirt does not so much as melt away as the gold melts back in. As he works he drains the tub halfway and fills it again, so it is fresher when he works in the conditioner; and when she is at last shining and new against his sunburnt arms he resets the plug and pulls her back against his chest.

She doesn’t float like dead-weight because it is not an image he will allow his mind to conjure; but she does not stretch her muscles to help him as he moves her in place, settles her so her skull doesn’t jab into the soft above his sternum. He doesn’t try to hide his cock from the small of her back; doesn’t even blush at how it likes the feel of her, warm and wet against him. His whole body likes the feel of her—the stretch of skin he feels on his stomach when she breathes, the pulse that beats when he presses his palm to her wrist—and if his cock is the thing that talks it’s nothing she wouldn’t hear anyway.

Whether it bothers her or not she doesn’t show him; just lies there against his chest as he works his hands up and down her tiny sides; just enough pressure to hold off the tickle but not enough to strain the bruises he saw when she undressed. He sees them through the water, turning her skin nearly as dark as his own hands. As if they’ve grown closer, in her hardship. As if she’s catching up.

She sighs at last when he runs his hand up the middle of her chest, large and spread and he never thought his paw would ever feel soft against her boniness, but here it is. He rests his hand across her breast just to feel there’s some weight to her; he sees the flutter of her eyelashes as she closes her eyes and breathes into his palm, pushing him out, pulling him, beating her heart into his lifeline.

He works her thighs as he did her sides and just as he feels his own self drifting off into the rhythm of it, one of her hands comes up to rest across the back of his. He tilts his chin into her hair and watches through half closed eyes as she follows his path; barely a press, not even the breath of one, but with the two of them it’s enough to rub the muscles and tendons back to life; to press into the soft of her hip just hard enough that she jerks, and the breath of surprise she gives might in another life have been a giggle. In his new life with her new life it leads him to smile; and because for now he is letting his body speak he presses his mouth to her skull so she can feel it.

At last the water grows cold and she begins to shiver, so he urges her up with the press of his palm. She moves slow, like molasses, as if she has forgotten how to move or is just now learning how; he presses his chest to her back as he reaches between her ankles to pull the plug, and is startled when she holds his arms there. Not by any command of her own, but by the way she folds into him; like a whirlpool or a bursting star she curls into his chest and brings his arms with her, folded like paper cranes across her stomach. He takes the moment to listen to her breathe; she shivers again, and he drags them back to his orbit.

He feels she’s given him permission to look, or at least to not turn his eyes away; and he takes care to notice, as he rubs her down with the towel inscribed with some dead person’s name, the things he’s read a lover might; the large brown birthmark near the base of her spine, the other, smaller, beneath her armpit; the way the hair between her legs swirls out lighter and lighter until by mid-thigh it is nearly translucent. She looks at him looking and he knows she looks herself; he feels the beginning of wanting in her, to learn his skin in turn, and the fact that she’s wanting lets him breathe again.

He reaches for the tank top and shorts she’d been given as pajamas, but pauses and leaves her a moment, brings one of his shirts instead; works the buttons through with slow and firm fingers until she’s covered from collarbone to thigh. Little goosepimples erupt on her skin as she looks at him looking at her and with a palm against her back he leads her to bed.

He doesn’t put his own clothes on; feels somehow that she wants the rough skin of his thighs on the smooth backs of her own, wants his unmitigated heat. They don’t fit together as spoons but in some sort of tangle; she ends up half turned to look at him with his whole body covering hers as well as the blanket might. He hasn’t brushed his teeth since the night before but she doesn’t seem to mind the roll of his breath across her face; maybe, perhaps, she presses into it, and the flutter of her nostrils is for more than just filling her lungs. Her eyes are large and unblinking as he pulls the sheet up around her neck. He knows in minutes they will be too warm; will in time sweat away the clean their bath has left them. But that’s alright. His sweat will join with her sweat and the clean that leaves is somehow just as sweet.

There is something almost post-coital in the air as he feels himself drifting, floating but for the anchor of his eyes on her face, the draw of that circular scar, the one thing to say, 30 hours ago, that he was not dreaming. As his eyes drift closed he touches it with his lips, and her whole body shudders; she folds her arm underneath his to touch his scars, and he shakes too, bound together on that current that’s always meant they’re breathing.

“Daryl?”

He feels more than hears her say his name, for he has his fingertips on the base of her throat and hardly enough air leaves her lungs to make a sound. It’s a fight to open his eyes, but when he does, he’s proud. There’s something new breaking through the dullness of her; fragile, perhaps, and prone to cracking; but in it is the breath he breathes to say her name, to chill the one tear on her cheek.

“Thank you for taking care of me.”

Her voice, too, is that of a newborn bird, molted and heaving as the horror of living bursts across it. But there is a softness to it, too, a warmth; the fever that brings the healing.

“Alright, girl. You rest now. It’s alright.”

“Thank you.”

“You rest.”

And she does. And he does. And together they sleep till morning.


End file.
